Frameworks in PHP

Mar 21st, 2009

I was hearing about frameworks for more than 1 year . I was having good touch with Jose. I used to ask my doubts and he has helped me a lot. It was from his mouth I heard about framework. When he used to tell about the framework in PHP I was not much aware about , what a framework is , what it can do ……. He used to talk about the symfony-project . When I was going for the first interview in PHP , I called Jose and Victor George one of my seniors who were working on PHP. They gave me lots of informations. Some of them were related to frameworks , MVC etc. I was really new to PHP, learning the basics, so when reading about it , I don’t understand much. Many computer science and Information Technology guys may have heard about the commonly used buzz word OOP ( Object Oriented Programming ). When teachers used to tell us, many of us may not understand , what they are talking about. Yes, they will be telling real word many times when introducing OOP’s concept. The OOP approach was made clear when I started learning Java. Yes we will not understand just by reading, but need to work on it, to understand the features and all. This is the same case for Framework. But when I started working on PHP , it was really a mess to write codes each and every time for new projects. So you may have thought about resusable codes. Many of you may be copying codes from one project to another. Now here comes the role of Frameworks. If you are not planning to move to framework, then its not a big deal. Because framework are used mainly for big projects and where security to be considered. When the projects are small , frameworks may consume time. This is not what I am saying, but from the knowledge what I gained from reading. ( Updated : Working in a framework will not increase security , the coder must be aware of it ) So if you are not using frameworks , you can try the Manuel Lemo’s form validation class. This is a great class with good examples and all. You will love the features , if you start using it. Its good for the client and server side validation . Many of the problems that arise to the forms can be rectified by this wonderful class. You can get the class from phpclasses.org . Php classes , pear etc have a great collection of classes, which you can use and can make a small framework of your own. But what about security and all ?I too was not much aware of the security and other issues, but after exploring each day , I learned something new. I thought of learning a framework. I was looking here and there , to get a good one. I mailed to my friends who are working in PHP to help me select a good one. Some of the PHP frameworks in the list where, symfony , zend-framework , phpcake, Yii Framework . One of my friend Rajeev is working on symfony . He told its a little bit harder to learn . But I thought of moving to symfony , as I will be getting help from my friends too .Not only that , but its being used in the dailymotions , delicious of yahoo . Symfony has many inbuilt functions like testing, security , model view controller etc . It may take some time , to learn symfony. The first tutorial was a wondeful one , with how much ease you can create a blog. Wow its simply superb . So if you know it properly you can build quickly . Some of the functions are automatic admin generation , many plugins available. I was thinking after seeing the first tutorail , why I have not started learning sysmfony. Its too late . ……….. need some sleep . Bye and Have a great day .